Chapter 11
eleven
Nikolaj
Idream in pieces first… that’s how it always starts now. Not with sense or even with story, but fragments sharp enough to draw blood and useless enough to leave me furious when I wake.
But tonight the fragments don’t scatter, they settle.
The dream drags me down through smoke and half memory, through warm gold lamplight, the scent of sex, and the cologne Vincenzo always wore like he’d been born expensive. Then suddenly it stops being pieces and becomes one image clear enough to hurt.
Vincenzo is above me, head thrown back in pleasure, throat bared, dark hair falling loose around a face slack with lust. His breath catches on something that might be my name, and I feel the way the muscles in his stomach jump with the motion as he rides me.
I can’t seem to focus on anything except the fact that this man exists and somehow once existed like this for me. I’m in awe of him. The impossible, helpless marvel of seeing a man built like a blade come apart above me, and realizing he had once let me witness it.
His eyes crack open and find mine. “You’re staring again,” he rasps, voice so fucked out and hoarse, it scrapes down my spine.
“Can you blame me?” I say, my own voice broken and breathless. “You look like a sin that forgot how to be forgiven.”
The second those words hit him, he seems to splinter. His rhythm stutters, his mouth parts, and his eyes go dark and wide.
“You undo me, Nikolaj.”
Then the dream breaks apart around the image of him, and I wake up hard, confused, and breathing like I’ve been running for miles.
The ceiling of my bedroom at Saint Helena swims into focus above me, pale in the early gray light leaking through the curtains.
For a second, I don’t know where I am. All I feel is the weight pressing down on me, the ache low in my gut, my painfully hard cock pressed against the sheets, and Vincenzo’s taste lingering on my lips.
“Fuck,” I mutter, voice rough from sleep.
I drag a hand over my face and stare up at the ceiling.
The dream doesn’t recede—that’s the problem.
Usually, they start dissolving the second I wake, details tearing away before I can get hold of them.
This one stays. The look on his face, the scrape of his voice.
My own words, spoken with the kind of aching devotion that no enemy should ever draw out of a man like me.
“Fucking unbelievable,” I mutter to the empty room.
My cock twitches against my stomach at the memory of the dream, and I glare upward as though my own body has personally betrayed me. Which, to be fair, it has.
I know I should take care of it. The practical solution is right there—hand, shower, five quiet minutes, and less edge in me when the day starts.
But the idea pisses me off on principle because the image in my head is Vincenzo above me, and I refuse to jerk off to a recovered memory like some lovesick teenager with no self-respect.
That lasts all of ten seconds before I realize the self-respect argument is already dead on arrival because I’m lying here, naked and hard, thinking about how he tasted when I kissed him.
I throw the sheets back, swing my legs over the side of the bed, and stand.
Cold air slides over my skin, waking the rest of me faster than I’d like.
I sleep naked, always have. Clothes in bed feel restrictive and stupid, and there’s no one in this wing with enough of a death wish to come into my quarters.
I stalk toward the adjoining bathroom, then stop halfway because I smell fresh coffee.
Saint Helena is secure enough that every unexpected smell matters.
My room opens into a private suite: bedroom, bath, sitting area, and the kitchen space down one short staircase lined with dark marble and old stone.
I stand there listening for half a second—no alarm, no shouting, no gunfire, and no footsteps from guards rushing a breach. Just the house breathing around me and the low, quiet clink of ceramic against stone below.
I go downstairs naked and in a mood foul enough to make priests sweat. One hand is already curled into a fist as I hit the bottom step—but I stop so abruptly it’s almost undignified.
Vincenzo is sitting at my marble counter, drinking coffee.
For one insane second, my brain simply refuses the image.
Black trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, dark hair slightly disordered in that infuriatingly aristocratic way that makes him look more expensive rather than less composed. No jacket, and no tie.
He’s perched on one of the stools by the island with one ankle hooked against the rung, coffee cup in one hand, the morning paper folded beside him as if he’s some domesticated husband waiting for me to come down and complain about the weather.
My first reaction is anger. My second is the humiliating awareness that he looks obscenely good in my kitchen. My third is that he has the audacity to glance up, take in the fact that I’m completely naked, and not even try to hide the way his eyes dip.
That’s what gets me moving again.
I cross the space between us fast enough that he barely has time to set the coffee down before I’ve got a hand around his throat and the other braced on the counter, shoving him backward on the stool.
A lesser man would panic. Vincenzo just looks up at me with widening pupils and a mouth that wants to smile.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I demand.
My hand is at his throat, yes, but it isn’t violent. Not really. It’s pressure and possession, and the sort of contact we were always too stupid to separate from threat.
He knows it too; of course, he does. I’m standing between his knees, naked, still fucking hard, and glaring down at him because he’s trespassed directly into the center of my last functioning nerve. There is no version of this that reads as clean aggression.
His eyes flick once to my mouth, then lower, then come back up with amusement curling under the exhaustion in his face. “Good morning to you, too.”
“Don’t act cute, Vieri.”
He chuckles at that. “Impossible request.”
I squeeze slightly, just enough to make the line of his throat shift beneath my hand. “My guards let you in?”
He actually laughs, and it does nothing good to my pulse.
“You broke into my space twice,” he says. “It felt rude not to return the favor.”
“This isn’t a favor. This is suicidal.”
His brows lift. “Your men didn’t shoot me, which suggests they either know better or have excellent taste.”
I stare at him, incredulous. “You broke into Saint Helena to drink my coffee.”
“I didn’t break in,” he says. “Kai let me in.”
I blink, and he takes obvious pleasure in my confusion. All I can do is stare. Then a sound escapes me that’s half laugh and half deeply offended curse. “That fucking traitor.”
Vincenzo’s smile finally breaks free, small but real. “I made the coffee, though.”
I look toward the pot on the far counter as if that explains anything. It does not. Then I look back at him, and the smile is still there.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I say.
“Neither were you, in my gym.”
“That was different.”
“Because you were shirtless?”
“Because I was asking questions.”
His gaze drifts meaningfully over my body. “Mhm, and this isn’t?”
I hate that I understand the flirtatiousness in it before he fully says it.
I hate even more that my mouth nearly answers on instinct.
I’ve been stoic for years by practice, by necessity, by sheer fucking survival.
But around him all that old verbal filth comes prowling out of the cellar where I keep it, eager and half-starved.
“What exactly are you asking,” I say, keeping my tone flat on purpose, “while sitting in my kitchen at dawn?”
His eyes meet mine again. “Whether you always wake up this angry.”
“Only when I find Italians where my breakfast should be.”
His grin only grows wider. “There was a time when you never knew the difference.”
I can see it plainly that the bastard is enjoying himself now. There’s something almost boyish in the amusement, which would be less dangerous if it didn’t pair so obscenely with the man he’s grown into.
At Vintermoor, he was the one with more control, always the composed one on the surface, while I snapped and bit and pushed. Now the temperament has shifted in the most insulting possible way.
I’m the one standing here with a hand at his throat, trying to remember I’m supposed to be a feared Pakhan. He’s the one sitting there practically begging to be ruined with that infuriating lazy confidence and a mouth made for trouble.
He sees the realization happen, and a laugh slips out of him, wicked and far too pleased. I narrow my eyes. “I’m about to put you through the counter.”
“And I’m the one flirting.” His voice drops on the last word, amused enough to make the back of my neck heat. “The world really does change.”
I should let go of his throat; I know that. The smart move is distance, clothing, and at least the illusion of normal conversation before I do something more compromising than standing naked in front of the man whom I apparently loved enough to destroy us both.
Instead, I lean in closer. “What if I don’t want it to?” I ask.
That shuts him up for one glorious second.
The hand not holding the coffee cup shifts on the counter. His fingers flex once, as though resisting the urge to touch me somewhere he absolutely shouldn’t.
There’s the result I was looking for. There’s the old problem in him. There’s the same man who used to act untouchable until I got close enough to remind him he was very, very human after all.
“Careful,” he murmurs.
“Why?” I tighten my grip just enough to feel the pulse jump in his throat. “You came into my house. You sat in my kitchen. You watched me come downstairs like this and still had the nerve to flirt. I should put you on your knees.”
His eyes dip again, absolutely shameless now. “Put me there, then,” he says finally, voice roughened by pressure and want.
The fact that he manages not to gasp when my fingers tighten proves he still practices the same discipline that made him lethal before he ever lifted a gun.
I loathe the effect it has on me. That some stupid, vicious part of me likes hearing him like this—stepping into danger with both hands open now while I’m the one trying and failing to keep a straight face.
My mouth betrays me first, curving despite every effort. “You’re talking a lot for a man under my hand.”
He tilts his head fractionally, enough to press a little more of his throat into my palm. The move is so calculated it nearly knocks the breath out of me.
“And you’re still not doing anything useful with it,” he says, and I watch his pupils swallow amber-whiskey brown.
He’s already breathing shallower than when I walked in. That’s the sight I missed more than I’ll ever confess aloud: a king on the verge of falling apart because I asked, not because the world forced him.
But I decide to step back fully, the absence feeling like skin peeled away. He lets his head fall forward, hair shadowing his eyes, breathing hard. I watch the tremor still rolling under his forearms.
My own heart pounds so loud the walls hum with it. “Coffee,” I rasp after a beat. “I have a feeling you came here to offer information disguised as caffeine. Start talking.”
He lifts his head slowly, eyes clearing enough to show me the ruthless strategist who commands nations in daylight.
“There’s a fissure in the Reyes line,” he says, voice rough but steadier.
“Helena’s broker is arming both sides of a power grab.
If they go to war in Madrid, the next Five Families summit will collapse before it’s inked.
” He drags a hand through his hair, exhaling.
“I need your supply routes through Odessa open to move resources fast. That’s what I came to ask. ”
I nod, forcing my body to remember how to stand without leaning toward him. “You came to bargain, not beg. Good.” I step to the island, pour the abandoned coffee into a fresh mug, and drink. It scalds my throat but helps pull me back into colder territory.
“I’ll move cargo tonight—just intel packages, maybe humanitarian cover so no one blinks. But you owe me rights on port fees in Valencia when this is over. And a body.” At his raised brow, I clarify, “The broker’s head, publicly.”
The faint curve of his lips returns. “Done,” he says, and straightens, adjusting his cuffs.
A beat of silence swells, heavy with the weight of choices neither of us can dodge forever. I sip coffee and admire the slight flush painted across his throat. “You really slipped past Kai?”
“Offered him a favor owed,” he admits. “He cares more about your happiness than your walls.”
I hum around the rim of the mug, both infuriated and fond. I close my eyes for one beat because murder is simpler than this.
When I open them again, he’s still looking at me with that same bright, unbearable mixture of affection, lust, and challenge. It feels too familiar. Too easy. Too dangerous.
It also feels like home in all the ways that word has never deserved.